Wood Basing
This information is property of Hraagh. Introduction In my games with channel people, I see a lot of room for improvement. This guide is directed mainly at channel people who want to improve their play and not be slaughtered by good titans. If you think that you personally don't need to get better, you're wrong. Considering your gameplay to be perfect will get you chewed up by a good titan. As with any tutorial, these should be considered guidelines, and not hard rules. 1: Buildings This is a common mistake. Build only what you need. As titan, often I'll scan, see something like this, and head over pronto. Even if the harvesters are det'd, this is a substantial chunk of early-game xp and gold. 3 command centers would suffice, instead of 11. This baser has done somewhat better. Only 2 CC's, a handful of harvesters, and a few supplies. If the titan finds it, the baser hasn't lost that much income or fed the titan that much. This is generally what I expect from a channel player these days. It isn't perfect, though. 2: Denial I'm not talking about detonating the harvesters. You already know to do that. What we want is to deny the buildings too! Attack your supply depot once(for reaper/zealot) or twice(marine) with your builder to get them burning. Do the same with your CC. Put the supply depots in range of the CC, and when the titan comes, order the supplies to destroy the CC's and then each other. Consider the following picture (the same base as the previous.) If the titan comes, he gets... 2 walls of feed and not much else. It takes a little practice getting the supplies to destroy each other at the same time. To help with this, leave space between them so the missiles have time to fly. Zerglings need to use a queen instead of depots. That beig said, it is highly advised that characters who are not skilled at denial simply kill the supplies in the first place. Many people fail to deny supplies on time and only allow the titan to gain feed at a faster rate than normal. 3: Protection Your harvesters must be protected at all times. Wall off the wood base, hotkey the peons, and be ready to detonate at all times. Te problem is when a sneaky titan scan-nukes your harvesters behind the walls. This is easily mitigated. Observe the following picture: Any titan will just bomb the harvesters before hitting the wall and alerting you to detonate. The walls in this situation are useless. However, if they're put far away, like so: This way, you have much more time to react and detonate. The titan has no choice but to go through those walls before being in nuke range of your workers. Take the extra time, build walls farther out, and deny the titan that feed. Here's another example of walls protecting the far right lumber spot. Get creative with the walls! Every second of the titan's time wasted is more time to gold and lumber, and gives you certain knowledge of his location. Which leads to my next point: 4: Awareness This happens all too often. You think that you always know where the titan is and where he's going. You've got an idea for the perfect wood base, one that the titan won't find for a long time. But then... Never, ever leave your builder in a dead end. You're just begging to become a minion at that point. There are no walls around the map, no overlords, no DT following the titan. This zealot deserved every bit of what he got. This zealot is being stupid: There's no blocking walls, the titan's whereabouts are completely unknown, and he's mining wood in a dead end base. Guess what happened next? This one does somewhat better: There is some map vision with overlords and walls. The titan is known to be far away from the base. However, he shouldn't leave his builder there. It would be much better to sit at the juke point in the base to the left, to go off and gold, to do anything but sit in a dead end. Conclusion: This is by no means a perfect or complete guide. I intend to keep adding to it and altering it as I think of more details, improve my own gameplay, and add the things I overlooked the first time.